The Church of Eleven22 - Wk 11: What’s So Amazing About Grace?

Episode Date: March 25, 2018

Grace is the free: Gift of Righteousness by faith Apart from works that Changes who we are by Eternally securing us in God's love

Amen. Amen. Church, would it be okay if we start with a prayer? Let's pray together. God, we thank you for your faithfulness. We thank you that you are good and that your plan is perfect. And we thank you for the Brant family's testimony. And more than that, Father, we thank you for the healing work you did on baby Christian.

And God, we pray that you would cast any cancer as far as the east is from the West and that he would grow to be healthy and whole and happy and that it would be used by you. And that this point of suffering in their life, God, would be a testimony to your faithfulness and grace. And that you would use them in incredible ways. And that you would use this story for your glory. We thank you. And, Father, we pray for all who are here, for all who are sick and all who are facing illness. Father, would you help them?

And would you heal them in Jesus' name? Maybe today, Father, would you meet them right wherever they are and do what only are. you can do is the great physician. We love you and we thank you and it's in your name we pray. And all God's people said. Amen. Amen. Thank you, church. If you have your notes, go ahead and grab those. If you have your Bibles, you're going to grab that. We're going to be in Romans chapter 5. Romans chapter 5. Today we are going to be wrestling with and talking about and having some discussion around the revelation, the unearthing reality, the most profound truth in all of the universe. which is grace?

We are going to ask what grace is, and we are going to define what it means to be people who are under and in the grace of God. So if you have your Bible's Romans chapter 5, we're going to start in verse 1. And it says this, therefore, now anytime you see a therefore in the Bible, it is there for a reason. Right.

So what Paul is doing is he is looking back in summary. If you've been hanging out with us at 1122 for a while for the last 10, 11 weeks we've been studying verse by verse through the book of Romans. And so chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 have been quite the journey. And so Paul is saying, therefore, everything we've talked about thus far,

I'm about to sum up in a sentence or two. That's what therefore is there for. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him, we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand. You're going to want to underline that phrase, grace in which we stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. You're going to want to underline that as well, the hope of the glory of God. Because today, we're going to ask and

answer two questions. Number one, what does it mean to stand in grace? What does it mean to be found in grace. And then the second question is, what does it mean to rejoice in the hope of the glory of God? These are not phrases that we normally use or that are commonplace in our language. So when the apostle Paul is describing to us who we now are, what is he talking about? And if you have your notice, we're going to use the word grace as kind of an alliteration to help us define what this journey is really all about. So the word grace, we're going to break it apart letter by letter. The first thing that we want to wrestle with and understand that grace is, grace is a free gift. Grace is a free gift. Now Romans 1 tells us, and if you remember back,

and if you missed it, you should totally go check it out. But Romans 1 tells us who the giver of the gift is, and it paints this really intense and beautiful picture of what makes this gift necessary. Why does God have to give us grace? Why does He desire to give grace to people? Now, let me ask you this. What makes a gift valuable? Of all the gifts you've ever received, what's been the most meaningful one you've ever received from one?

And what makes it valuable? What gives a gift? It's valuable. It's value. So, for example, if I were to come up to you and I were to say, hey, I got something for you. I want you to have this. I appreciate you so much, and I'm just so thankful for you.

I want you to have this watercolor polar bear. I do. From my heart to yours, would you take this watercolor polar bear? You would be like, yes. You'd be like, somebody has done lost their mind. Why? Because it's a watercolor polar bear. It doesn't mean all that much to you.

I probably don't mean all that much to you, but to me, this watercolor polar bear is incredibly meaningful. Why? Well, you see that little name right there? It says Abigail. Abigail's my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. She's got blonde hair and blue eyes and she's full of life. I'm pretty sure she's going to end up being an MMA fighter. She's super full of joy.

And she walks up to me and she says, Daddy, I have something for you. You see, this is not a watercolor polar bear. To me, this is a gift of love for my daughter. So what gives a gift its value? Well, one of the things that gives us its value is who's giving it to you? Who gives you a thing assigns value to that thing regardless of what that thing is? Right?

And in the case of grace, the who is the infinite creator of everyone and everything. It is the sovereign ruler over all the universe. It is God Almighty. It is the one who was and is and is to come. It is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. The one who's all the universes in all of the cosmos spin around and center around his throne room where angels are flying around him all day, every day,

saying, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty. That is the who gives us the gift of grace. And so he makes it incredibly meaningful. But it's not just who gives grace that adds value to it. It's also how much the gift cost. So if I were to come up to you and say, hey, here's a million dollars. I want you to have a million dollars. You'd be like jackpot, right?

You'd be feeling good about that, even if you don't irrelevant to me. But if I told you, I earned this million dollars by swimming across the ocean, fighting off sharks and overcoming great obstacles, in order for you to have this million dollars, you'd be like, whoa, this million dollars is super intense. So it's not just who gives it is how much it costs. And when it comes to grace, on God's behalf, grace is incredibly expensive.

It costs him a lot. It costs him the only begotten. It cost him the only beloved. It cost him his son, Jesus. He gave up his son's life so that we, could experience grace. So grace is not just any old gift. It is an incredibly valuable gift. But a gift of what? A gift of what? If it's a gift, what is the gift? Well, grace is the gift of righteousness by faith apart from works. Grace is the gift of righteousness by faith

apart from works. In Romans chapter two, three, and four, we have seen the Apostle Paul elaborate perfectly about the exacting nature of God's righteousness, meaning that righteousness is something that God requires of us and provides to us by the means of faith. And not just faith in God. It's important that we get this clear. It's not just believing that there is a God or not just believing that God's out there somewhere doing something. It is actually that righteousness is given to us by faith in Jesus Christ as God. and in his perfect life, in his sacrificial death, and in his glorious resurrection,

trusting in Jesus as our Lord, when we do that, God counts to us righteousness. The ability to believe the message of Jesus Christ, that he lived the perfect life, that he died a sacrificial death, and that he rose again three days later, of which we're going to lose our minds over next weekend. It's going to be awesome as we celebrate Easter.

this resurrected life that we focus all of our life on the ability to believe in this is a gift. It is an act of grace on God's behalf in order for us to have the faith to believe. And then when we believe, God credits righteousness to us. Now we've talked about this extensively over the last few weeks, and so I'm not going to spend a ton of time on it. Abraham, thus far in the book of Romans, has been the primary. example as to what it means to be credited righteousness or imputed righteousness. Romans chapter 4 talks extensively about Abraham. You can go back and read it or listen to it,

but this idea of credited righteousness, this idea of whole righteousness. You see, in my life, I actually only believed, for the majority of my life, I accidentally believed half the gospel. I only believed half of the gospel. I believe that this is kind of how it worked, I thought, that I prayed some prayer and that I trusted in Jesus and all the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and that God would forgive me of my sins. And he would clean my slate of all the things I had done in the past. But now it was my job to get to work.

And that I had to start filling in my slate with good works in order to stay in God's favor. So God would forgive my sins, but in order to stay in God's favor, I had to do a bunch of good works. But that's not actually what the Bible teaches. What the Bible actually teaches us is that God, yes, he forgives us by this merciful act of grace through the life, death of Jesus Christ, for sure. But he then writes Jesus' name on the slate.

And it is Jesus' good works that sustain me for all of eternity. It is completely apart from works. It's unmerited. It's unconditional. It's unlimited. I can't earn it. There's nothing I will ever do or have ever done that could put me in God's. favor. God's favor toward me is a gift from God that is righteousness by faith. So how's this

work? Let me tell it. Let me paint it this way. A couple of years ago, Pastor Joby and I were on a mission trip in Brazil. And we were down there and as you know, we helped plant churches in Brazil and we support a seminary, a multi-year program to raise up pastors in Brazil. And we were down they're training some pastors and Pastor Jobb he was preaching at a conference and and we had a morning free. And on that free morning, they were like, hey, we want to take you guys down with a ministry team to work in one of the slums in Rio. And we were like, man, awesome. We're into that. And so he and I both have traveled pretty extensively. And so we just thought, you know, we're going to go and pray for some people, maybe get the chance to share the gospel. It's going to be super exciting.

So we load up the car, we drive over and we meet this ministry team. And it's this general gentleman in his 60s and a couple of 20-year-old Brazilians. And every week for more than a decade, this gentleman had been going into this specific slum, loving on people and praying with people and sharing the gospel with people and just doing really, really, really good gospel work. And he had been there, never missed three, four times a week. He was always in there loving on people, caring for people. So we meet them.

They tell us the story of the ministry that they're doing. and they're like, hey, we're going to walk in, and we're going to take some supplies with us. And will you help us carry the supplies? And I'm like, yeah, for sure. And so they hand me a grocery bag full of buttered bread. And they hand Pastor Jobi two leaders of Fanta. I mean, nothing says Jesus loves you like buttered bread and fanta, right? And so Pastor Jobi and I, we start following this ministry team down this side road,

and we walk up to this huge ditch in the road. The road had been completely dug out, like six, seven feet deep. We had to kind of like Indiana Jones it on the side to get past it. And I was like, hey, what's that all about? And they were like, oh, they blew the road out, and then they dug it out so that the police couldn't get back here. Okay. Okay. So we're just walking, and I'm thinking about the conversation.

I do not want to have the elders explaining taking Pastor Jobi into the slum. And then I'm like, hey, you know, what's this place called? And they're like, oh, the name of this slum is crackland. Awesome. And so we're walking down the street. We go a little bit further. We come around the corner. And I kid you not.

There are like card tables, seven, eight card tables set up with mountains of crack cocaine. I'm not talking about a couple of baggies. I'm talking about mountains. There are grown men with automatic weapons. It is like right out of a movie. And I'm like, hi. Want some bread? You know, like, what are you going to do?

And so, we're standing there, and in the king pan of the whole thing, he whistles. You know, I can't do it. I'm not that. I'm not manly enough. And he whistles, and then he does this number right here. And I was like, that could mean many things. That could mean many things. And so we, and everybody stops.

All the people buying crack, dozens of them, they back. out and all the people selling crack, they kind of just straighten up. And this, one of the ministry team people that we're with, this little 20-something-year-old 100-pound Brazilian woman just starts laying the gospel down. She just starts preaching the love of Jesus, the forgiveness of Jesus, the grace of God. And she's just going at it and then she prays over them and she's calling them to repent, to change their ways. And the whole time this is going on, I'm standing there thinking, I'm like,

What is keeping these men? You got these two American brothers down here in this slum in Brazil. What is keeping them from robbing us, from stealing from us, from making us leave or even worse, from killing us? What is keeping these? There are guns everywhere. What is keeping them from putting two in the chest and one in the head? And as I left and I started to think about it, is it because they thought we were fine up, standing, young gentleman? Is it because of our devilish good looks? Is it because they know about the

church of 1122 and all the great works that God's doing in Jacksonville? No. It literally had nothing to do with us. We hadn't done a thing that would keep them from stealing from us or from hurting us. Not one thing. Why? So why then? Because of who we were with. You see, the man that we were with had earned their respect. He had earned their favor. He had earned their audience. For coming in there multiple days for more than a decade, he had earned the right to be heard, the right to be seen.

This is credited righteousness. They credited to us what that man had earned. And in the same way, God credits to us through faith, what Jesus earned on our behalf, which is eternity in God's family. This is what grace is. It is the gift of righteousness by faith apart from works. We didn't do anything to deserve it. Nothing.

We never can and we never will, but God gives it freely because of Jesus. So I ask you, as we head into the Easter season, do you know anybody who needs to hear the message of the grace of God? Do you know anybody who's trapped in the religious cycles of legalism or is trapped in addiction or someone who is trapped in the success of the American dream and they are wandering far from God? Do you know anybody who needs to hear the message of the grace of God? And if so, I would encourage you today, invite them on Easter. We make it simple for you.

In your handout, we have all of our Easter services and service times printed. We're going to have a bajillion services next weekend. A bejillion. That's a Bible word. It's Greek. Bajillion. We're going to have a bajillion services at all of our locations around the city. Easter is an incredibly simple time. It is a time where people who would come to church where normally they would do not miss this opportunity to invite someone who needs to encounter the grace of God. Because you know Pastor Job is going to be preaching some gospel up in here on Easter. And so we're praying for your one more.

We want to join you in prayer. In the seat back in front of you, there's a respond card. You can write the name of your one more. more on that respond card and we're going to be praying for them this week. Invite people to hear about this gift of righteousness by faith apart from works. So the answer to question number one, what does it mean to stand in grace? That's what the apostle Paul says. You stand in grace. It means to have been given the gift of righteousness by faith apart from works. So why did God give us this grace? Why did God give us this grace? Why did God give us?

this gift. He answers it in verse 2 so that we can rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. So that we can rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. What does that mean? Well, in order to answer that, we have to define what is the glory of God.

We talk about God's glory in church a lot and sometimes I think that the human mind can begin to think about God's glory as this like ethereal otherness that floating out there and is beyond any ability to think rightly about and that there's no way that we could ever really get a working definition of what God's glory is.

But the Bible offers us a completely different explanation. In Hebrews, chapter 1, verse 3, the author of Hebrew says this, he, meaning Jesus, is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Here's what Hebrews is telling us, is telling us that Jesus is the glory of God.

So the glory of God, all of God's beauty, all of God's holiness, all of God's manifest realities, all of His ways are higher than our ways, thoughts are higher than our thoughts, all of the glory of God is revealed to us in the person of Jesus. Jesus is the glory of God. Now think about this. All over the New Testament, you're going to see these two words, in Christ. And it's going to be specifically speaking about those of us who have been gifted the faith to believe in Jesus, that we are now found in Christ. We have a new found eternal position. You are in Christ. So,

Think about what this means. God the Father, God the Son, who is Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit, they love each other a bunch. We believe in the Trinitarian God of the Bible. They are in love with each other. They always have been. For all of eternity past and for all of eternity past and for all of eternity future, God the Father and God the Son, who is Jesus, are going to be lavishing love. And God, the Holy Spirit, are going to be lavishing love on each other.

It's this cosmic, perfect love festival. going on where they are completely and wholly satisfied in themselves. They are completely content in their self-contained relationship. They love each other. All day, every day, it is glory, it is honor, it is affection, it is praise, it is adoration. That is the relationship between God the Father and God the Son, who is Jesus. Now, in this cosmic move of mercy and by this beautiful act of grace, God grabs humans and puts them where? in Christ.

In Christ. So now we have this newfound eternal position that is in Jesus. Hebrew says he is seated at the right hand of the Father. So when God looks at us, he sees the finished work of Jesus. You understand? And so think about this. All the affection, all the love, all the honor, all the glory that the Father is lavishing on the sun, he is lavishing on us.

that's the beauty of the gospel. That is the gift of grace that all the affection, all the honor, all the glory that the Father lavishes on Jesus, he lavishes on us. Why? Not because we did anything to deserve it, but because he is good. Because he is good.

So here we stand. Bathe in love, clothed in Jesus' righteousness, heirs to glory, cherished, treasured, adored? You'd be like, hold on, man. I don't feel treasured and I don't feel adored. I don't feel loved right now. Well, it's a good thing that your feelings aren't God.

Your feelings don't get to tell God how to feel about you. Regardless of how we feel, it doesn't make it not true. Even on the days where I don't feel loved and I don't feel treasured and I don't feel rooted in Christ. It does not change the fact that I am. This is God's faithfulness. This newfound eternal position, it changes everything. Philip Yancey, the author writes it like this.

He says, grace means there is nothing I can do to make God love me more and nothing I can do to make God love me less. It means that I, even I who deserve the opposite, I'm invited to take my place at the table in God's family. And so for the rest of our text today, the Apostle Paul is talking about how this reality of grace changes who we are. Grace is the gift of righteousness by faith

apart from works that changes who we are. It changes us. In verse 3, 4 and 5, Paul writes this. Not only that, but we are. we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance. Hold on. We were just talking about being loved and treasured and cherished and adored and all the glory of God and these big eternal realities that are full of beauty and truth. And now Paul writes, the next verse, he says, but we rejoice in our sufferings. Huh? Why have we got to talk about suffering? We were

just talking about being loved and things going good. That's what Paul writes, but we rejoice in our sufferings. Knowing that suffering produces endurance and endurance. Endurance produces character and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. You see, what's so amazing about grace is that it changes everything. It changes our eternity. It changes our lives. It changes how we succeed.

It changes how we relate to each other. It changes everything. It even changes how we suffer. Grace changes everything. I don't know about you and I don't know what you've walked through or what you're walking through. But the truth is, man, sometimes life's just hard. Sometimes things just don't go our way. You know, Jesus tells us this.

Jesus actually promises us. He says, in this life, you will face trouble. you will face sorrow. And if I'm honest with you today, just us here talking, that's kind of the season I'm in. I'm in a place where there's just some, life's just hard. I mean, on the surface, everything's buttoned up and everything's going real good. And, man, I can put on the show with the best of them.

But the truth is, it's just a season of suffering right now. you see my dad is very sick and I talk about my dad a lot because he's the he's the greatest man that I've ever known he in his prime he was a great Bible teacher

he has degrees in ministry and theology degrees on top of degrees super intelligent super godly super faithful he's a kind man he's a gentle man he's meek patient

everything good about me in my life I can attribute to my father. He pastored at the same church I grew up in, this little small town I grew up in. He was a pastor on staff there for the majority of his ministry career. He and that church, God did great things through them thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people came to know Christ through the ministry of this church. It was a megachurch before megachurches were even a thing. thing. And my father was also the chaplain for our county police department. And so multiple nights a week, he would be out doing death notifications in really hard ministry, meeting people in some of their darkest times. And he loved it. He loved doing ministry. He was a community

servant. He served on the school board of our county. My father was a good man. He never took himself too seriously. And he never talked too much. He truly is admirable. And then, as a lot of you know, my mom got sick. And I'm not going to relive that entire story in front of you here today, but as hard as that season was on me, it was insanely hard on my dad. I mean, just think about it, the pressure of ministry and raising two teenage boys and your wife's dying of cancer, been married to her since you were 20, high school sweethearts, your birthdays are the same age, your birthdays are 13 days apart, grew up together, and

See, when my mom died, part of my dad died too. It was a tough deal. I saw him cry, I saw him fast, I saw him suffer. I never saw him complain though. A few years go by after my mom dies and we hold it together for the most part. My dad remarries a wonderful woman who has become one of my best friends on the planet. Shortly after they marry, I'm off to college and that's a very much. that's about the time things started to get pretty complicated.

I wasn't in college too terribly long, and then I'd start calling home. I'd call my dad at home, and he wouldn't answer the phone for days. This was strange. Just to tell you how religiously jacked up I was, I would call my dad, and he wouldn't answer, and I'd be like, okay, and then he wouldn't answer twice, and I'd say, okay, and he wouldn't answer three times,

and I swear I'd think the rapture happened, and I missed it. And my thing. theology was so whacked out. I didn't know if I... There were days where I didn't know if I was a Christian or not, but I was sure he was, and I thought, oh, man, I missed it. And so I'd call my dad, and you shouldn't have think that. That's bad thinking.

But I'd call him and he wouldn't answer. And even when we would talk, things were just kind of... Had lost their flavor. And after a little bit of time with this, my aunt and uncle invited us down to offer a vacation down in St. Pete. And I remember getting there and seeing my dad and realizing something was terribly wrong. And you see, my father had slipped into a deep depression. His physiology just wasn't working the way that it used to.

And communication was a challenge, and it was super hard. And I remember one night my brother and I were sitting on the back porch on this vacation talking about, what are we going to do? One of the hardest things I've ever had to reconcile in my life was realizing that my dad was not going to be able to take care of me anymore. So as we sat there and we were discussing it, we decided the best thing to do was to just pray. It was a lesson we had learned through suffering with my mom. So we did. We asked my dad to come out and we laid hands on him. We asked God to heal him.

We asked God to help him and us. My dad didn't say anything. He didn't hug us. He didn't say thank you. He didn't pray for us. This is the man who taught me how to pray. It's the man who taught me everything I know about the Bible. He didn't say anything.

He just got up and he went back inside. And I just remember sitting there feeling incredibly confused. Sometimes it's still how I feel. So for a few years, a cycle of doctors and psychiatrists and neurologists would go on. My dad was in his early 50s at the time. time, 53. And after a couple of years of functioning at best, we had a breakthrough. After lots and lots of tests, my dad got diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And the seasons of depression that he had been walking through were for him the result of this early onset neurological disorder.

You see, my dad's dad, my grandfather died of Alzheimer's at 57. Now my dad's in his mid-50s at this point in time and he's been diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease called Parkinson's. These degenerative brain diseases are brutal. I know some of you have lost loved ones and have loved ones with these diagnosis and I'm so sorry. It's a hard road to walk. If I'm honest with you today, sometimes I get scared about my future. I worry about my wife and my kids. When's my time coming? My mom died of cancer at 42. My dad, has a degenerative brain diseases of which we're in the last stages of, and he's 64. If I'm honest with you, I have a lot of fear inside me.

Every day, I worry about this stuff. Man, I know all the Bible verses. I do, and I preach them to myself. You see this message of faith versus fear that we preach here, it's real to me. Every day. And here's what I'm learning. the ability to have the opportunity to lean into faith and not be a slave to fear, that's a gift of grace.

That I have faith to believe. That's a gift. You see how that works? This stuff's real, man. This is our lives. This is not some story this ended and we have decades to process it or any kind of resolution. We're still in it. My dad's very sick.

It turns out that he was misdiagnosed with Parkinson's, and he actually has a really rare brain disease known as PSP. He's pretty much non-communicative. He is dependent on caretakers, namely his wife, Joyce. Look, if God calls you or God has ever put you in the situation to be a caretaker for someone who's dependent, listen to me right now. there is no thing on this planet that I have ever seen that is closer to Christ's likeness

than taking care of somebody who's sick who cannot take care of themselves and so if that's you take heart take heart we know for sure we're in the last stages of this disease for the last few months my dad has been sick on top of sick He's been sepsis twice

Been fighting a kidney stone We try to get up there as much as we can We spent some time with him He was in the hospital throughout the Christmas holidays And we're able to spend some time with him And just a few weeks ago I was in Atlanta sitting with him And it came time for him to eat

And so I had the honor of feeding him See most days my dad can't feed himself So I had the honor of feeding him and I had never done this before. It was the first time for me. And at first, it was, it was terrible. It was, it was not, it was terrible. I'm standing there with this plate of scrambled eggs.

I'm smushing them up. And I could see it in his eyes. He could see it in my face and it's just really hard, you know. As I'm giving him a bite, and then another bite. I had this moment. We're in my mind. I saw my dad hugging my mom in heaven.

And then all of a sudden, I started thinking about my dad standing face to face with Jesus. And I lost it. What a gift. All my life, all my dad has ever wanted to do is to glorify God. So to have a moment on this earth to be able to think about my dad being in glory, with God? What a gift. What a gift. And if that moment is a gift, how much more significant is the gift that God gives us of eternity with him? You see, after my father passes from this earth and he has

been in heaven one billion years, he will only just be beginning. And so I think that's what Paul's talking about in Romans 5. I think that's what Paul means when he says that we rejoice in our sufferings because we have hope in the glory of God. I think this is what Paul's trying to explain to us. You see, I'm sad for sure. I'm confused for sure, but I have hope because I've been gifted the ability to believe in Jesus. And Jesus is my hope. He is our. He is our. our hope. You see, Jesus is the giver and the gift. And this gift changes us.

And here's how it changes us. It changes us by eternally securing us in God's love. That forever and ever and ever, because of this gift of righteousness by faith, apart from works that changes who we are, we are eternally forever. secure in God's love. And here's what that means. It means sorrow won't win. Jesus did tell us in this life, you will face trouble. You will face sorrow. But right after that, he says, but take heart because I have overcome the world. So to be eternally secure in God's love, here's what it means. It means sorrow won't win. It means cancer won't win. It means cancer won't win.

it means that degenerative brain diseases don't get the last word it means that the curse of sin in this world doesn't win the death doesn't win it means that Satan won't win to be eternally secure in God's love means that Jesus wins he wins and it is in his victory that by faith we now

stand. And so because he wins, we win. This is what it means to hope in the glory of God. So my prayer for you is that wherever you are and whatever you're going through, whether it be success or suffering, that somehow today your heart would be encouraged, you're not in this alone. God loves you. God has extended a free gift to you, which is the righteousness by faith in Jesus Christ. He wants to give you this gift of grace and he wants to change you with it. And he wants you to know that you are eternally secure in his love. Not because you did anything, but because he is good. So here's how we're going to end today, church. If you're here and you have been diagnosed with an incurable disease or you have been diagnosed with a potentially

terminal disease, we want to pray for you. The Bible clearly tells us that when people are sick to bring them to the elders and the leaders of the church and anoint them with oil and pray for them. And we want to pray for you. So if you are here and you have been diagnosed with an incurable disease or a potentially terminal disease, or you have a family member who has been diagnosed with one of those things, and they're not here today. And you want to stand in the gap for them and receive prayer on their behalf. we want you to come. In a minute I'm going to pray, and as soon as I say,

amen, we're going to have people at all of our locations down front ready to pray for you and to anoint you with oil. We believe that God is a healing God. We believe that God can do anything he wants to do, and so we want to pray for you and pray with you. If you've been diagnosed with incurable, potentially terminal, or have a family member who that is true, of. Would you come so that we can pray for you? Will you stand with me across all of our campuses?

As we respond and people come to receive prayer, we're going to worship him together. Let's pray together as a church. Father, we thank you that you have given us hope and that you have invited us into a relationship with you and that you have extended to us grace. Father, we thank you for your love poured out on us, for your invited for the seat at the table in your family that you've made for us. We pray that you would do your healing work across the city of Jacksonville. Father, we pray that you would respond to our prayers. Father, we pray that you would continue to meet us here.

And, Father, we pray that your heart would be blessed by our prayers and by our acts of worship. We love you more than anything in this world. We pray all these things. in the power of your name. Amen.